Once again, Microsoft has released a powerful new AI video feature that threatens an entire segment of recent startups.

Roughly 3 years ago, a wave of video analysis platforms launched, with some being heavily funded by the venture capital community. Grain, Otter, Panopto, Clipr, ReWatch – each had its own spin on joining your Zoom or Teams meetings and making them more accessible. Highlights, summaries, transcripts and more… a plethora of features brought value to the meetings you missed and simplified follow-through for those you attended.

With yesterday’s release of Intelligent Recap for Teams meetings, Microsoft may be putting all these companies on borrowed time.

What’s bad news for VCs, however, is yet more good news for Office 365 subscribers as the platform’s feature set continues to expand.

Intelligent Recap (IR) is a new feature for Microsoft Teams Premium that automatically generates a recap of your Teams meetings. The recap includes a summary of the key discussion points, action items, and important decisions made during the meeting.

Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model, IR can learn your preferences and generate recaps that are tailored to you. For example, if you always like to know the key takeaways from a meeting, IR will always include those in the recap.

Here are some benefits of using Intelligent Recap:

• Save time by not having to take notes during meetings
• Get a quick overview of the key discussion points, action items, and important decisions made during the meeting
• Review the meeting transcript if you missed anything
• Stay on top of your work by having a record of all your meetings

Keep in mind, Intelligent Recap is one more feature for Teams Premium, a paid add-on license that already provides advanced capabilities for meetings, webinars, and virtual appointments. These features include:

• Large Webinars: Teams Premium enables organizations to host high-quality webinars with up to 10,000 attendees. Webinars can be recorded and shared on-demand, and attendees can ask questions and interact with presenters in real time.

• More personalized and intelligent meetings: Teams Premium features help make meetings more productive and engaging by providing live captions, meeting recording, and in-meeting analytics.

• Enhanced protection for meetings: Teams Premium features help protect meetings by providing sensitivity labels, watermarking, and end-to-end encryption.
• Advanced management and reporting capabilities for IT: Teams Premium features provide IT administrators with advanced management and reporting capabilities to help them better manage Teams usage and compliance.
• Advanced Virtual Appointments: Teams Premium makes it easy for organizations to schedule and manage virtual appointments. Appointments can be booked through the Teams calendar, and attendees can join the appointment from their computer or mobile device.

Available with Commercial and GCC licenses, Teams Premium is an add-on and needs to be purchased by any organization with a standard 365 license. During June, Microsoft is offering a promotional rate but even at its normal monthly per-user cost, a company trying to match Teams Premium by using Zoom in conjunction with a video analytics tool like Otter.AI would be paying at least three times as much! Moreover, that business wouldn’t be working within apps native to its own Microsoft environment.

Best of all, Teams Premium – and, thus, Intelligent Recap – can be tried for free for 30 days by any Microsoft 365 customer. If it hasn’t been enabled in your organization, your IT administrator can help you get started.

In the end, Intelligent Recap is a new feature – one we’re just starting to test ourselves – so it may have some rough edges for a short period of time. Still, this enhancement to the Teams Premium package made it one we could no longer avoid trying out.